SPEAKER_04

So the problem has been we don't have the ability to collect enough data, or not until recently, to collect and understand what all of that means.

So we've been kind of poking in the dark for decades.

And so probably for the last 20 years, I've developed a number of instruments and turned them into companies that allow everybody to access a level of information they couldn't get before.

So what happens is that there's sort of a dance between the mutations that initiate a tumor and then sort of an evolution of how the tumor eventually learns how to trick the immune system to not recognize it.

So we have all kinds of internal—I mean, literally every day, every person, you'll develop five cancer-like objects inside of your body.

But the immune system and your body has a way of shutting it down very quickly.

But with enough time and with enough variation, tumors will eventually evolve in a way—

that trick the immune system not only into not recognize them, but in fact to help them and feed them in a way to create an inflammatory environment that actually then the tumor uses to propagate its own cell division and then metastasis.

It's not so much a normal function.

It's a byproduct of what evolution is, that when the genes mutate when a cell divides or if you go out and, you know, stand in the sun too much, for instance, you get skin cancers because you're getting ionizing radiation that's changing the DNA, making a mutation.

And some of those random mutations will initiate a cancer.

So, for instance, I have a mutation called MIDFE318K.

It's a mutation that I was born with.

It wasn't in my family.

And it causes both melanoma and kidney cancer, which I've had both.

I've had a dozen melanomas alone.

We didn't find that out until a couple of years ago, but I've been following it over the years.

And we basically figured out, okay, it's going to have to be this.

So we had my genome sequenced.

But that's just one of hundreds of different kinds of mutations that can occur that are on a path towards creating a cancer.